Pro-Trump TV Network Has Big-League Dreams

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump frequently pointed to the press corps covering his rallies and implored them to pan the audience to show the size of the crowds he was drawing. When the cameras remained fixed on him, Trump labeled the news media “dishonest.”

One camera, however, dutifully began to pan the audience. The clunky, black Panasonic PS2 belonging to Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN), a year-old conservative media startup based in Alabama, made a habit of filming the teeming crowds at Trump rallies and developed a cult following in the process, with Trump supporters regularly holding up makeshift “I love RSBN” signs and seeking out the RSBN cameramen to wave. “The way to tell an RSBN camera is it moves,” says the company’s founder and CEO Joe Seales. “The rest of them stay straight.”

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Starting last July, RSBN started regularly sending cameramen to film Trump rallies around the country. Today, the resulting videos, which streamed live on YouTube, have racked up a combined 116 million views, and RSBN’s YouTube channel—the most comprehensive collection of Trump political footage anywhere—boasts 244,000 subscribers, rivaling MSNBC’s 252,000, and CBS News’ 307,000. Type “right” into YouTube’s search bar and “right side broadcasting” is one of the first automatic suggestions to appear.

RSBN’s willingness to do Trump’s bidding—or its “positivity,” as Seales puts it—has won it more than just viewers. During the campaign, the Trump team gave RSBN prime real estate in press risers at rallies and a direct line to its social media team, still active today. Seales says he messages regularly with Trump’s Director of Social Media Dan Scavino (who was just named to the White House communications team), Digital Director Brad Parscale and Assistant Director of Data Analytics Avi Berkowitz, the mastermind behind the Trump campaign’s own pre- and post-debate talk show, “Trump Tower Live,” which streamed on Facebook. At Berkowitz’s request, RSBN provided the manpower and streaming expertise to produce that talk show. On Halloween, when the Trump press team decorated pumpkins for its traveling press corps, it gave RSBN’s logo equal footing with those of NBC, Fox, CBS, CNN and ABC. And next week, RSBN cameras and reporters will be at the inauguration and inaugural balls—including the so-called “Deplora-Ball,” whose guests include far-right radio host Alex Jones and former Trump adviser Roger Stone.

At the same time, the openly pro-Trump RSBN—which bills itself as a “ragtag bunch of media outsiders” seeking to deliver news to the common man—has been quietly attempting to transform itself from a small live-stream operation into a major and diverse digitalmedia outlet, just in time to cover the Trump White House. Over the past eight weeks, the network has been hiring a lineup of conservative talk show hosts and television presenters, running the gamut from two preppycollege students who urge young conservatives to get involved on their campuses to former Infowars reporter Joe Biggs, who heavily promoted the false Pizzagate rumors. On January 16, RSBN will open an office on 2nd Street SE in Washington D.C., one block from the U.S. Capitol. The network is even banking on its coziness with the Trump campaign to win it a coveted seat in the White House briefing room. “I have been told that we’re OK and they’ll get us in,” Seales says.

Already, RSBN politicsreporter and on-air host Liz Willis won entry to the president-elect’s first press conference, at which Trump refused to take questions from CNN’s Jim Acosta, labeling his network “fake news.” Willis was not selected for a question either, but RSBN’s live streamed video of the event has received over 750,000 views on YouTube and was one of the site’s top “Trending” videos that day. This was helped, no doubt, by The Drudge Report’s linking to RSBN’s feed in its headline banner. “My wife is making a collage of all the Drudge headlines,” Seales says. “We’ve been on headline at least 30 times and on Drudge overall over 80 times. One time, we got the headline in red with the siren, which is like gold.”

It all makes one wonder whether liberal worries that conservative Breitbart News is fast becoming “the official propaganda arm of the Trump campaign” might be a bit premature. After all, it’s not Breitbart whose feed the Trump team chose to project on the jumbotron at a recent rally in Mobile, Alabama, or that received a public thank you from Trump social media director Dan Scavino on Twitter for playing “a major role in the success of @realDonaldTrump and @TeamTrump.”

***

When I visit Seales, 36, in early December at his east central Alabamastudio, located behind a gas station on the border between Auburn and Opelika, Trump is still on his “Thank You Tour,” a circumstance that has sparked a mini-crisis in the office.

Trump is scheduled to give a speech at the Dow Chemical Hangar in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in five minutes and Brad Savage, RSBN’s number two cameraman—RSBN only has two cameramen, and number one is currently en route to Michigan—is calling Seales to say he’s locked out of the event. The Louisiana GOP doesn’t recognize Savage as a member of Trump’s traveling press corps, he explains over the phone to his boss.

On Halloween, when the Trump press team decorated pumpkins for its traveling press corps, it gave RSBN’s logo equal footing with those of NBC, Fox, CBS, CNN and ABC. | Photo courtesy of RSBN

Seales, sitting at the first of six cubicles that fill a 1,500-square-foot office adorned with framed copies of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and a “Make America Great Again” poster, consults a second smartphone that he has pulled from the back pocket of his jeans. He explains to me that “Mr. Trump” is often late. There’s plenty of time to get a pass for Savage, a 27-year-old North Carolina native who variously worked as a firefighter, an EMT, a tow truck driver and a driver in Trump’s motorcade before he answered Seales’ plea for cameramen on YouTube. Indeed, after a few calls to the Louisiana GOP, Savage is in.

An hour later, Seales gets on the phone again. This time it’s with Berkowitz, Trump’s data guru, as the two prepare to link up RSBN’s video feed to Trump’s Facebook page. Seales is preoccupied with the poor video quality of the feed and asks his friend-turned-employee Adam Taxin, who has just walked into the studio, to lend a hand. The son of a Philadelphia-area radiologist, Taxin is the proud holder of three Ivy League degrees: an AB from Harvard and a JD/MBA from Columbia. Sporting a baseball cap emblazoned with the RSBN microphone logo and a tucked-in button-down shirt, he’s too busy perusing conservative news site Gateway Pundit (which he describes as “sloppy,” but reads anyway) to be of much help. (Taxin considers Rush Limbaugh to be the gold standard in conservative media.)

The RSBN operation, which now employs 14 full-time employees and three contractors, began in July 2015, when Seales, a stay-at-home father at the time, grew frustrated with the lack of raw Trump rally footage online. He hired a freelancer to film what became the network’s first Trump rally broadcast and posted it on YouTube. When the video quickly amassed a million views, Seales realized that there was a robust demand for pure Trump footage—a feed that wasn’t clipped or talked over by mainstream outlets. “Show the full context,” he says. “People are smart enough to make up their own mind.” That was when, borrowing from a phrase he’s fond of using—“being on the right side of history”—Seales started Right Side Broadcasting Network, originally a livestream operation airing on YouTube. He later added two call-in talk shows to the network’s YouTube channel, one hosted by conservative commentator Wayne Dupree, the other hosted by televangelist Pastor Mark Burns, a Trump surrogate.

Sensing that internet infrastructure would be important to his new venture, Seales moved his family from Pensacola, Florida, to Opelika, Alabama. (The rusting industrial town had recently spent $43 million to wire itself with super high-speed fiber optic cables.) He roped his wife into running RSBN’s back office—handling taxes and “legal stuff”—and their house quickly morphed into a full-blown news studio, with newly hired producers and on-air talent often crashing there when the evening’s work was done. In December, Seales opened a separate RSBN headquarters in Opelika. “We were growing too fast,” he says. “I had to get the dang thing out of my house.”

The expansion hasn’t been cheap. The network’s only sources of cash are YouTube ad revenue and donations from viewers. The contributions are mostly in the range of $25—though two children once sent RSBN $7 inside a handmade card that Seales considers invaluable. In October, small donations totaled $40,000, allowing RSBN to travel to each rally during Trump’s frenzied run-up to Election Day as well as to open the new studio. More recently, however, as Trump has scaled back his rally schedule, donations have started to run dry, and Seales has had to dip into his own savings.

Seales, who says he felt an obligation to RSBN’s donors to continue spreading Trump’s message regardless of who became president, doesn’t think his work is done. He wants RSBN to be the source conservatives can turn to for a break from the “pre-packaged narrative.” “We’re outsiders and we don’t know what we’re doing and to a degree that’s appealing to a lot of people who are used to stiff, scripted mainstream stuff,” he says.

The new D.C. office is part of this plan. It’s also a sizeable expense—but one that Seales hopes will pay off. Various members of Trump’s team have already promised RSBN entry to daily White House press briefings, Seales says, though he admits neither he nor Trump’s team realized how complicated fulfilling that promise actually is. (It would ordinarily require approval from the White House Correspondents' Association.) Even if RSBN does not gain access, the CEO hopes the D.C. office will be useful for conducting interviews with members of Congress. “We want to have a presence there to stay relevant,” he says. “It’s advantageous to have a base there.”

***

At the studio, another RSBN broadcast has just wrapped up. In it, conservative commentator Dennis Michael Lynch walked breathlessly around his native Long Island neighborhood while presenting his take on the news of the day to his front-facing smartphone camera. On this particular day, Lynch is upset about comments from the NAACP that proposed voter identification laws in Michigan would suppress minority votes. “If you can’t get yourself an ID, I don’t want your vote. You shouldn’t even be allowed to vote,” he says into the camera before allowing his alter ego to respond in a calmer voice. “DML, you’re going off the farm.” “I’m not going off the farm,” Lynch No. 1 responds. “Think about this. Seriously. These people are claiming that they don’t have the wherewithal, they don’t have the intelligence to get an identification. Seriously? It’s comments like that that hold back the black community.” Despite their low-budget production value, Lynch’s “Walk and Talk” videos routinely earned 100,000 views when he posted them on Facebook, but he was not able to monetize the attention there. In December, he signed a deal with RSBN to allow his videos to be simulcast on RSBN’s YouTube channel for a share of any ad revenue they generate.

The deal with Lynch is part of Seales’ dream of turning RSBN into the 24/7 news outlet of the common man. “It’s normal people giving normal people the news,” Seales says. When RSBN covered early reports of the Fort Lauderdale airport shooting last week, writer Steve Lookner read updates for the camera dressed in a hoodie and asked gun enthusiast Savage, dressed in a white t-shirt and winter jacket, to come out from behind the camera to give his opinions on the weapon used and the gunman’s training. The video quickly racked up nearly 64,000 views on YouTube.“If somebody killed and injured this many people that fast, does that suggest anything about the amount of ammo that might have been in there?” asks Lookner. “Well, there are what you would consider high capacity magazines that would hold, say, 14 rounds,” Savage responds, with the air of someone who regularly empties high capacity magazines at the shooting range.

Other ideas in the works include a conservative alternative to Comedy Central’s The Daily Show (for which Lookner, who has a Seinfeld credit to his name, will be responsible), short documentary films glorifying small town America and cartoons about America’s Founding Fathers intended for children. “There's a lot of issues in the way kids are being taught history,” Seales says. “It’s revisionist history. They have a negative view of the Founders. The kids need to be told the whole story.”

Other RSBN hosts with deals like Lynch’s revenue-sharing gig include the young conservative campus activists Kassy Dillon and Will Nardi,as well as the two originals—Burns and Dupree. And more hosts are coming. Former SiriusXM host Dino Costa will have a late night variety show, and former Infowars reporter Biggs is piloting a gun and outdoors show, though a recent Media Matters blog post highlighting tweets in which Biggs joked about date rape and assault may have put his chances for full-time employment at RSBN in jeopardy. “We’re learning as we go,” says Seales, who indicates that Biggs will be producing shows on a freelance basis.

There seem to be two major themes that tie the varied programming together: Patriotism and love of Trump. “I see an ungodly number of stories that are negative about Trump,” says Seales, gesturing to a television on which CNN is playing. “Why not see what Trump’s got and give him a chance?”

In RSBN’s office, pictures of the president-elect fill the desktop backgrounds. But Seales insists the network is not a propaganda outlet and says he would risk his hypothetical White House press access to prove it. “It’s not like we’re Trump super-fans and we worship him,” he says, without a trace of irony. The desktop backgrounds, according to Seales, were a practical joke hatched by his brother Jacob, who was until recently an Iowa-based guitar teacher before he was pulled into composing original music for RSBN’s videos. (The next time I visit the studio, the Trump desktop backgrounds are gone.)

“We believe in a certain set of principles,” says Seales. Those principles largely include tight borders and an insistence that immigrants be proud to assimilate into American society. Seales isn’t concerned that Trump appears to be backing away from campaign promises to have Mexico pay for a border wall. He explains that Trump is new to politics—that’s part of his appeal. Trump may have to “change course” on some campaign promises once he’s in office and has more complete information. (Even so, Seales thinks Mexico will eventually pay.)

That doesn’t mean RSBN considers itself part of the so-called “alt-right,” which Seales says he’s not sure how to define. “The white supremacists on the fringe? We disavow,” he says. “That’s why I found moderators for the chat rooms, because they’d get in there sometimes and say things and everybody would get really upset.” For a while, the sole moderator was Seales’ own mother, whose job it was to boot the foul-mouthed and racist from her son’s website and YouTube channel. Today, RSBN has 25 volunteer moderators and Mother Seales receives $200 per month to supervise them.

Seales also points to the diversity of his small team as evidence of his repudiation of the alt-right. Two of his talk show hosts are black, as is a producer. Kassy Dillon is a female millennial. And Taxin is an Orthodox Jew. “Do you not realize you’re calling people neo-Nazis who are Jewish?” asks Taxin, taking off his RSBN baseball cap to reveal a yarmulke. “Yeah, bring it on. Make me the face of the alt-right.”

Despite this diversity, ensuring that his own employees don’t tweet anything that might be considered offensive to minorities has at times been a struggle. Seales recently reprimanded Savage for suggesting on Twitter that Islam is an inherently inferior religion, as evidenced by the treatment of women and homosexuals in some Muslim countries. “That’s not what we stand for,” says Seales. “That is not how we feel at all. I am conservative, but I love everybody.”

Seales will admit that Trump has faults. He acknowledges the president-elect “said things that are very bad,” referring specifically to Trump’s comments about sexually assaulting women. But he considers Hillary Clinton’s actions worse. “They weren’t getting as much time as the ‘Trump is a sexual predator and he’s going to be in the White House’ narrative,” he tells me. Seales hasn’t been 100 percent satisfied with the transition so far, either. The selection of Betsy DeVos as Trump’s education secretary, for example, disappointed him because of her ties to a group that supports the Common Core education standards. “Maybe they talked and she’s changed her mind on it, and if so, that’s fine,” he says. “Other than that I’m pretty happy so far, and if I am unhappy I’ll let it be known.”

Indeed, as the network prepares to cover the inauguration and the pending Trump presidency, Seales insists that RSBN will cover Trump objectively.

“If Trump goes back on his word,” he tells me, “we have hours and hours worth of video we can go back to if we need to keep him honest.”